Aidan Moffat’s final album as L. Pierre will be a vinyl-only LP, released with no sleeve, and in his own words “a self-destructive dialogue on the value of music and its new platforms, culture’s cyclical nature, the supposed death of the album – and the seeming immortality and inherent nostalgia of vinyl.”

Moffat explains his concept behind the idea further: “I don’t want a pristine, digital document that could last forever; I want the music left to the elements, I want it to live and scar, with each record’s acquired crackles, pops and scratches making them unique and identifiable to their owners. And while the natural thing to do with a naked record is protect it, I think it could be interesting to see how folk respond when we hand that responsibility over. Also, the sleeveless LP will look like one of those dusty, vulnerable strays you find in charity shops, which is precisely where L. Pierre began.”

All the samples Moffat has used are from Nathan Milstein’s version of a Mendelssohn concerto, which was released on the very first 33 1/3rpm long-playing 12” record in 1948. These samples from the original 1948 recording were all ripped from YouTube, the biggest free music streaming platform in the world.

The vinyl will have a locked groove at the end, “adding another wee element of interaction – the album won’t stop until the listener decides it should (which also works as an analogy for the resilience of vinyl in our digital age). And because the death of the album is proclaimed every few months these days, I wanted it to sound like a sort of ironic requiem. The title’s an unfinished tombstone with no date of death: “1948-”
This will be the last record from L. Pierre. The End.

Below is a copy of the original letter sent to Melodic, which accompanied a dubplate demo of the full LP.